A team of Harvard researchers reviewed 53 different
randomized control trials that included over 68,000 people.
They compared
low-fat diets to
low-carb diets, other high-fat diets, and participants'
usual diets and found that people on low-fat diets didn't
lose more weight than people following other kinds of
diets.

"In fact," the authors concluded in the study, "higher-fat,
low-carbohydrate dietary interventions led to a slight but
significant, greater long-term weight loss than did low-fat
interventions."

"It’s not that low-fat diets are particularly bad, but they’re no
more effective than others," Kevin D. Hall of the National
Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, who was
not involved in the study,
told Reuters.

The study authors also noted that the amount of weight loss
people saw, no matter what diet they were following, depended on
how strictly they adhered to the diet and how long they stuck to
it. The intensity of a diet mattered much more than the type.

"This study, which has systematically reviewed data from all the
relevant trials, reinforces the evidence from individual studies
that dieting, whether low fat or low carbohydrate,
works," said Susan Jebb, a professor of diet and population
health at the University of Oxford, in a
statement.

Thomson
Reuters

In the
review, the average amount of weight lost was about six
pounds. People on low-fat diets lost an average of 12 pounds more
than people who just followed their usual diets. People on
low-carb diets lost an additional 2.5 pounds more, on
average, than people on low-fat diets, and they kept the weight
off longer. But there was no difference in weight loss between
low-fat diets and some of the other high-fat diets.

"What we really need to do," the study's lead author
Deirdre Tobias told
The Guardian, "is step away from a discussion about fats and
carbs to whole foods and overall healthy eating patterns. We have
complicated what really should be very simple and that is eating
an overall healthy diet."

Eating healthy is simple, and it doesn't matter what the diet
that helps you do that is called. As
another major review recently
concluded: "A diet of minimally processed foods close to
nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with
health promotion and disease prevention." So don't miss the
forest for the trees — or the cheeseburgers.